NCTO: TPP agreement should exclude Vietnam

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement will put at risk hundreds of thousands of related apparel jobs in the Western Hemisphere that depend on U.S. textile exports, said Cass Johnson, president of the National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO) in testimony before the U.S. International Trade Commission in March. Vietnam has subsidized its textile and apparel export sector with $3 billion in new investment since 2008, and VINATEX, a state-owned conglomerate, is one of the largest garment producers in the world, two reasons Johnson gave for excluding Vietnam from a free-trade agreement that gives it an advantage over nonsubsidized countries. “The last thing our economy needs is another China problem,” says Johnson. “One quarter of Vietnam’s economy is devoted to exporting, a higher percentage than China’s, and workers in Vietnam are paid less than half the amount of workers in China.”